Page:Romance & Reality 2.pdf/91

Rh then to the scene without, which was quite lovely enough to fix the glance that it caught. Spring and Morning are ladies that owe half their charms to their portrait-painters. What are they in truth? One, a mixture of snow that covers the fair earth, or thaws that turn it into mud—keen east winds, with their attendant imps, coughs and colds—sunshine, which just looks enough in at the window to put out the fire, and then leaves you to feel the want of both. As for the other, what is it but damp grass, and an atmosphere of fog—to enjoy which, your early rising makes you sick and tired the rest of the day? These are the harsh and sallow realities of the red-lipped and coral-cheeked divinities of the picture. After all, the loveliness of Spring and Morning is like that of youth—the beauty of promise; beauty, perhaps, the most precious to the soul. Campbell exquisitely says, and let the heart be thankful from its inmost depths for that imaginative and self-existent faculty which first lends enchantment to the distance.